When Billy Hughes was chivvied for having joined every political outfit except the Country Party, he famously remarked “I had to draw the line somewhere”. Since its formation after World War I, the Country — now National — Party has been the exceptional party within the Australian system. Every other group has, or pretends to have, a universal message, even if they have only a partial social base. Only the CP/NP has been cheerfully willing to claim special conditions for white rural Australia, and damn the rest. That used to be statist buying-up of agricultural product; now it is ever larger social subsidies as the automation of farming and mining has hollowed out rural life.
The party’s strength lay in the fact that it would never form government; formed only a few years after the city/country balance shifted in favour of the former (in 1910), the party’s justification for its purely sectional approach was that the forces arrayed for urban classes were so strong that they needed to be uncompromising jerks on whatever ensemble of policies benefited certain parts of rural Australia (mining areas were Labor and Communist until the early 1960s).
But what’s happened now has stood that logic on its head. The now-National Party’s purview has shrunk. As former primary-produce centre towns have been filled out with new economic sectors — education, medical services, meth — Labor became more competitive. In turn, Labor became more attentive to rural needs, i.e. unwilling to push back against rural special treatment. And now the Libs have one eye to winning three-cornered contests.
The result has been decades of extending to rural Australia subsidies and special treatment denied to low-income urban Australians. It doesn’t look that way to rural Australians, but that’s only because the independent viability of whole regions has been collapsing faster than they can be supported by the state.
This kludgy political arrangement has been put under strain by the long-term, possibly permanent, shift in local climate conditions, currently labelled “the drought”. So far, this has run on the usual lines: the farming sector simultaneously bemoans the humbling of proud, independent Aussies, salt of the etc, while also asking for an ad-hoc subsidy to continue the decades of state subsidies that allowed this proud independence to exist. But now, with the post-quantitative easing (QE) global slowdown (i.e. a return to the stagnation post the 2008 crash, before QE inflated the tyres), wage power decline, wage theft as de facto income policy, and the penury of Newstart, etc, questions are starting to be asked.
With half-a-billion going to farmers to soften failure in the private market due to inherent conditions — i.e. the possibility of drought — Australia’s urban poor are missing out because they have no “Country Party” and Labor has stopped representing them. The gap has now yawned so wide that it’s the Nats who can see it represents a political danger: hence Barnaby Beetroot’s sudden conversion to a Newstart rise, and his remark that some farmers should maybe get out of farming.
The “drought” is also shifting climate change denialism on the right; they now realise that they can’t get a really big payout if they keep insisting this is merely cyclical. So now the National Farmers’ Federation is talking about “the permanent shift” in rural conditions. It’s an ill wind, I guess.
What would be really needed now is a bolder plan for rural Australia, sold with a bit of very tough love. Whole sections of rural Australia are simply a failed state scheme, and creating a viable “next rural Australia” requires a comprehensive triage. It’s clear that hundreds, maybe thousands of farms should be bought up by the state — these will often be grace payments for farms of no worth — and rewilded. Some sets of small dying country towns should be consolidated, with some towns abandoned (if it’s good for rural black people to have their communities remade so, why not for benefits-dependent rural white people?)
Cotton and wet rice, the thirst industries, need to be rationalised, and the rivers reflown. Farmer supplementary income support should be supplied through cashless welfare cards, so they can’t upgrade the Mercedes or pay boarding school fees with them. The deal has to be matched with a proportionally equal package for low-income urban Australia, and remote Indigenous communities. And so on.
Who could get this done politically? Well, no one, but it could initially be driven by the Greens, whose small rural base is usually in viable areas such as New England, and who could then gain greater urban support by becoming a visible champion of the urban poor. That would demand a leap, as the party is filling up with left neoliberals. The country needs a Party of the Poor, to put it simply — a left populist outfit, with a limited remit, no grand programs, but to self-represent the unrepresented. Such an outfit would only need to grab a couple of Senate seats to wield some real clout.
No easy ask, but the concurrence of “the drought” and the next recession suggests we need a complete do-over of relations between Australian sectors, and we have to draw the line somewhere.
Don’t forget introduction of mandatory drug testing for farmers and their families, Guy. That needs to be in the mix, too. We all know what those farmers are like. The moment they get their government handout, they’re off down the pub with their mates to spend up big on booze and drugs. Living a life of luxury while we poor working sods are left to carry on.
We’d only be doing for their benefit, of course. We want them to be able to drive their tractors when the rains come again.
^^^^^^ that’s Gold!
Rural Australia, after all, is the heartland of the Anglo colonial-settler. No left-wing movement will ever take-off there. Lenin’s 1913 letter “In Australia” laid out the political conditions upon which Australia is built — and still persists to this day.
You need to learn some history. Far north Queensland used to be known as the Red North earlier in the 20th century and had a huge range of radical political threads – of which the Labor movement was on the rightward edge. Talking of the Labor movement, they started in the bush, amongst shearers, again in Queensland.
Hanson, Lambie, Muir, all are in some way a response to the conditions Guy is talking about and many – not all – of their supporters would respond positively to a decent left agenda that wasn’t concocted by smug uni graduates in inner Melbourne or Sydney.
As a Far North Queenslander by birth, my family and extended family being cane farmers and banana farmers and fishermen and of course, the port of Townsville was an old stamping ground, yes, FNQ was certainly more politically radical then, including into the ’70’s than it is now.
Old Tom Aitkens was one of the very left, local members of parliament and could be found most Saturday mornings in the main street, Flinders St, deadly treadily rams horn handle bars propped beside him and a spiral notepad and pencil in hand; he has a suburb named after him these days.
Bowen had a communist mp, at the same time, as Menzies was trying to outlaw it; another referendum that didn’t pass, one wonders why.
That was fnQ then and now, all that are left in the rural areas are people who are up to their neck in hock with cane harvesting equipment, cane farmers who have wives who work off farm, the Italian farmers who sold off the mill to the Chinese, some long suffering locals who don’t/ can’t leave for family reasons and a couple of trucking firms doing well as long as the bananas are and yes, the jewel in the crown, tourist places.
Townsville, Cairns and Bowen are fly in fly out mine workers, their wives and children, the military in Townsville and the port workers and railway workers of Bowen, Townsville and not so much, Cairns.
The last election was won and lost on Facebook, beautifully run by Joh’s old spin doctor. It could almost have been called the F__K YOU election.
There was the ALP, not knowing how to tell people who have hung on hoping for a job from Adani, that it is a fully automated mine with about 50 jobs and there won’t be a new train line either.
The LNP were so busy being friends with the Adani Bros, they forgot that their drought stricken constituents might not think that pumping the only river in the area dry and allowing an uncapped water draw down of the Great Artesian Basin was a good idea, but Hey! the miners are our Donors, yeah!
And so, then we have the Palmer Party, and I will leave all the blokes to come up with, whatever!
Not even one member in parliament and yet, Clive and Pauline’s second preferences ran to the LNP, Clive wants something and he knows no one is going to take him on. Pauline and her Machiavellian counterpart, want power and unfortunately for them that, Jackie Lambie has the balance really.
The ads ran on the theme of disadvantage and the thought that the government was coming for a chop of your inheritance, Grim Reaper with Bill Shorten’s face, wild on Facebook.The something Clive fears greatly is someone taking something off him.
No one who wasn’t fair complexioned and light colored eyes needed to apply for Clive’s ads, with the people mostly female complaining that the government wasn’t doing enough for them. 2,000,000 shares of palpably untrue ads run on an unfiltered American site, obviously aligned with the Koch Bros (Tea Party).
Yep, come up with something that actually resonates with FNQ and really you will get a better response.
Ratty, whoever you are, Crikey should ran an article by you expanding on those themes.
It is becoming such a haven of the Melbourne knowledge class that I’m beginning to find it not worth the read. I reckon once Rundle’s gone, I will be too.
Gough had a decent left agenda. He was also pretty smug, and a uni graduate.
Lived in Cabramatta for while though.
Gough recruited the knowledge class to Labor. But then knowledge became corrupted by neoconism, and universities were co-opted and compromised. So subsequent Labor generations, unsurprisingly, lost the plot.
Today our country’s intellectual life is moribund. Systemic issues underlying sustainability and inequality are not being debated here. Now is the time to set up academies of the intellectual left. Where are our education entrepreneurs? Think-tanks are too exclusive – we need a wider reach.
It is not so much Labor’s smugness but its bewildered ignorance that makes it irrelevant to those at the coalface (pun intended). There are brilliant ideas and solutions out there, but unless some of this brainpower is disseminated and applied, we are all going to hell in a coal hopper.
The Queensland ALP also doesn’t have the courage to differentiate between the two types of coal we mine.
The future prospects for coking coal is into the 50 to 90 year mark, because it is the only coal that can be used to make steel, whilst thermal coal (Adani) is one step up from burning cow dung because it is dinosaur dung (joking). Currently, only 13% of the coal exported from Queensland is thermal.
Of course the CFMMEU also doesn’t have the courage (balls in the vernacular) to point out, that once the fully automated mine (Adani Bros) thermal coal comes onto the market, there will be major job losses in NSW thermal coal mines, because contrary to the IPA, this dinosaur fuel will be competing on the world market and not pulling Indian peasants out of poverty.
Clap your hands with glee, the Queensland Government, under Campbell Newman (LNP), gave the dodgy bros of India a ZERO royalty agreement for as long as it takes to pay off the cost of developing the mine, thus acknowledging that they will never pay tax in Australia either.
So, tell me, who gets a benefit from this development? Oh, other than Gina and Clive, I mean.
By the way, the reason so many Labor aligned lawyers graduated in the 70’s & 80’s was that they, were the “bloody university students” who were demonstrating and got belted and bashed by Joh’s thugs.
Although Mr Tony Fitzgerald (one of my heroes’) didn’t jail as many policemen as probably should have been. There were a lot of resignations, for undisclosed reasons.
Unfortunately, we are now seeing the generations , which is the generation who were too young to remember and I might add, are not informed at the Police Academy, just how bad the corrupt police of Queensland were. I informed the son of a friend of mine about an instance I knew of.
The policeman in this instance had said nothing because he didn’t know if his family would be safe and he didn’t know who he could trust. He gave evidence in camera to the Fitzgerald RC of a Pedophile ring prostituting children out of a watch house. Nothing like that had been explained to him, so, we are quickly making the mistakes of the past disappear.
Now to the future, fnQ actually has too much electricity (2 hydro stations, a relatively young coal fired power station on the coal mine site, and quite a few solar, wind, battery and pumped hydro using old mine sites.
There is a lithium deposit outside of Townsville and of course lead from Mount Isa mines (although I was once informed by the manager of Mount Isa mines that the 2 tonne ingots exported from Townsville Port, had more value in silver than in lead).
I suspect Clive is up to something because he has negotiated himself out of the Queensland Nickel Refinery insolvency.
Would the ALP in Queensland think about a lithium battery factory either in Townsville or Charters Towers, both of which are on a rail line still owned by the Queensland Government, as is the Townsville port.
This sort of development creates jobs and opportunities for skills development in the currently unemployed youth, will use up the excess energy that is currently being wasted.
Townsville could use more water (water restrictions for 9 months of the year is not good), so why not, lock in some money on low interest, and do something towards increasing the Burdekin Dam’s capacity and possibly start a pipeline towards the south, a deep holding dam would be a clever addition(maybe).
Stop running scared of Clive and get the messages out clearly, on Facebook. then perhaps North Queensland, will see it has a future.
Right in Ratty.
Right on Ratty.
Guy, it might also be added that the agriculture sector pay net negative taxes, and that much of their welfare is without the usual means testing, ensuring there is a genuine need, and the demeaning and shaming processes to discourage a sense of entitlement of city and poor regional people. For example, I know of one cattle station in western Queensland that received a $50,000 welfare cheque from the federal government last year as ‘aid’ for cattle lost in floods. They didn’t apply for it; the cheque just turned up in the mail. They didn’t lose one beast. And my guess is that the owners and recipients of the unasked for welfare cheque are multi-millionaires. Compare that to the treatment dished out to Robodebt single mothers, or 60yo women excluded from the aged pension and without the superannuation their husbands took.
The reforms to the rural sector in NZ by the Lange-Douglas government in the late 1980s might also be worth a look. After years of increasing subsidies from their Nationals, that NZ reforming Labour government abolished most agriculture subsidies. My understanding is that as a result farm incomes initially fell as did farm capital values and farm bankruptcies. But after the pain of the change, which was not inconsiderable (& ignored by government economists because there was an overall ‘pareto’ benefit), farming became more profitable without the subsidies.
The challenge here is how can you reform the sector in the face of climate change, where you are correct in saying many need to be encouraged off unsustainable land, when there is still such a strong sense of entitlement in regional Australia to never ending welfare and tax breaks?
I’ve lived among farmers for 40 years. The majority are an arrogant bunch who really know the value of a dollar or a benefit/subsidy. Their political views are set in super hardened concrete and they have a tendency to racism, supported by a natural superior bearing. The older ones are not well educated and view ‘book learning’ with suspicion. Of course there are beautiful, empathetic people as well but they are usually considered soft or, the ultimate insult in the bush, ‘greenies’. As climate change sets in the panic meter is rising and the realisation they have been on the wrong side of the science smacks them in the face. Strict means testing of any help should be applied because farmers feel entitled and know their way around
Much of Australian agriculture is unviable – some because of climate conditions and some for the environmental destruction wrought (eg cotton in dry land, salivation caused by irrigating inappropriately). Economic failure will rationalise the first. But only taking back water rights will rationalise the second.
I like the connection you make between rural and urban poor. Poverty and social and economic inequity is certainly where they intersect.
But why leave all this to market and regulatory forces when we are faced with the climate crisis? I am increasingly attracted to the idea of a Green New Deal. But we have no politicians in Australia who have the actual power to effect change and the ticker or intelligence to prosecute that case. It is not simply a matter of resolving inequities. It is a matter of saving the planet by, in part, resolving inequities.
A bit of a Freudian typo there. Presumably you meant “salination” caused by irrigating inappropriately, but the big water users (rice, cotton) are surely salivating at the cheap water they get their hands on at the expense of others downstream. It’s not just other rural producers, either. There are over a milliion people in SA dependent on a healthy Murray Darling system for their basic water needs.
Correct – salination not the auto-correct salivation!
Re the Freudian typo -it would appear Crikey’s auto-correct has a leftist id – or is it just a fixation on bodily fluids?
BA I couldn’t agree more on the need for a Green New Deal approach to save and restore what is left of our natural environment. This concept seems to be a no brainer to me for Labour to reconcile their urban voters climate change demands and the rural battlers concerns for local jobs. A GND would provide jobs rehabilitating farmland in western NSW and Qld that is no longer viable, replanting vegetation, eradicating weeds and feral animals, working with indigenous groups and organisations like Bush Heritage who do this sort of work now. Farmers could stay on their land and receive govt assistance to rehabilitate their land, surely not much more expensive than forking out drought relief endlessly while our top soil blows away and eventually out to sea.
This is not going to happen with the Nationals in power, they care only for coal miners, gas frackers and large multinational agribusinesses, many foreign owned. Yet mum and dad family farmers and rural township people keep voting for them, even while they are running out of water for the towns and the rivers are dry! What water there is held by big irrigators, used for coal mines, gas frackers or just being hoarded by corporate water speculators but hey Barnaby and George C understand our pain.
A sort of collective stupidity has descended upon us it seems.
Start by reintroducing the water license buy-back scheme. Earplugs may be needed to avoid being deafened by Barnaby’s screams of outrage. Introduce a water auditing scheme for big agriculture, and insert earplugs again. Remind the neolib Greens of their purpose; to be an alternative to the major parties and to champion the environment and the underprivileged. Insert earplugs again.
We should abolish tradeable water rights altogether. Hard cap private water usage, meter the cost fairly, use license limits to phase out wet crops, especially upstream, reflow the rivers, refill the wetlands, jail private water thieves
Agreed!
Totally Agree with you..
What, you mean actually prosecute them, not just have ‘strict laws’ to quote in public and then let them get away with it like land clearers? Heaven forbid. I note Morrison sings a different tune when it comes to Assange…but then it’s no excuse to the law to expose human rights abuses & war crimes